


can't bury anything (without digging it up)

by pprfaith



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bastardized Mythology, Character Study, Dark, Gen, Gore, Horror, I'm really just dipping my toes in a new fadom in the most dramatic way possible, Post Prison, Some might call that religious imagery, Violence, ish, season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-18
Updated: 2015-04-18
Packaged: 2018-03-24 15:19:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3773548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl and Beth after the fall of the prison. Becoming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	can't bury anything (without digging it up)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Nicole Dollenganger's _Rabid_ which is gorgeous and twisted and wonderful.
> 
> Unbetaed. All mistakes are mine. 
> 
> A new fandom and yet again, I am writing love letters to fictional characters, thinly disguised as stories. I just can't help myself with those two, though, and their chemistry. I hope I did them some kind of justice, even though I fear I may have fucked their characterization up a lot. Sorry.

+

They run through the woods, fleet-footed and silent. She leads, a halo of gold around a dirty face, leaping fallen logs and rounding dense shrubbery like she was born for it.

Above them, trees sway in a warm breeze, quiet in the heavy death throes of summer in Georgia. 

A small brook, a single bound, like a doe, head turned to meet his gaze across her shoulder. There is dirt streaked across her chin and cheek. Her smile doesn’t gut him anymore. 

They are ghosts in a dead world and Daryl’s never felt more alive than this.

+

When he was twelve, he stole a book from the school library. It wasn’t a very good one, just a small paperback collection of Greek myths, but it was the only one he had any he mouthed page after page, story after story to himself until he could read without tripping, until the other kids stopped laughing at him when he was called upon to read in class. 

He forgot all about the stories for years and years, forgot about those tales of heroes and princesses, of gods and monsters, forgot right through the end of the world and beyond. 

He forgot, until Beth Green sprints through the woods in front of him, her ringing laughter swallowed by dense foliage, and he tilts his head just the tiniest fraction and sees – 

A sprite instead, a wood nymph, a creature of magic and nature, elemental, ephemeral and eternal and he knows that’s a whole damn lot of a big words for a redneck like him, but she is, she is. Christ above, she is. 

+

They follow rivers, signs, train tracks, follow them to a place named after endings, upturned train cars and burnt shells of buildings. 

They stand framed by destruction, his bow in hand, her knife at the ready, and find no living thing.

Nothing but them. 

Daryl holds her until she stops shaking, watches the lazy tendrils of smoke still curling heavenwards. All his life, he’s been too late. His Ma, Merle, Sophia, Dale, so many others. He’s always too late. Beth hiccups against his chest and he hasn’t got the first clue what to do with her, upset teenage girl in a dead world, so he sets his jaw against the coming tantrum and simply says, “We gotta go.”

Numbly, she nods. 

+

Sometimes, he dreams of going to sleep in a pile of corpses, warm and yielding under his body. All of them have familiar faces. 

+

“Do you believe there are still good people in the world?” she asks him, once, over raw-burnt squirrel meat and a fire that does nothing to fend off the encroaching winter. 

He shrugs, squints at her through stringy, too long hair. “Don’t think the good‘ns‘re the ones ‘survive, ya know?”

Except for her, but he doesn’t say that. Except for her, but her knife is still stained red and her eyes are dry and they are none of them clean anymore, not now. 

“I’m still here,” she says, like she’s condemning herself. 

She cries that night, curled around him, her head in his lap. She cries for her red blade and the men that died at her hands, and he is relieved, so relieved.

“I do,” he whispers into the sleep-silence of her quiet breathing.

Further out, the dead moan their endless dirge. 

+

Silence is precious. Silence is safety. The peaceful silence of being alone in the woods, where fists and belts can’t reach. 

Noise has always meant danger, has meant people and pain and bruises. Now it means hungry corpses come to tear the flesh from his bones. Beth’s chatter, innocent bordering on manic, fills his skull like the buzzing of bees, endlessly droning and making him itch all over. Makes him tense, angry. Defensive. Makes him feel like he can’t hear death sneaking up on them, slow, stupid. 

He yells. She stops, fear in her big, bright eyes. 

Silence. But it’s rough, uncomfortable, like ill-fitting clothes, the only ones he’s ever worn. Ugly. She keeps sneaking glances at him from the corner of her eyes, keeps stop-starting some little comment, a question, a story. Working up the courage to defy him. She will, he knows, and soon. She’s never been afraid enough of him.

Her voice grows lower eventually, softer, but even when he yells at her again, she refuses to be gagged until, eventually, the noise of her sinks into his bones, like the rest of her. 

+

“Can you teach me?” she wants to know, twirling one of his precious arrows between nimble fingers.

He grunts at her, question. 

She raises the projectile, answer. 

A nod. 

They spend three days holed up in a little cabin built against a sheer rock wall, defensible and dilapidated and the best place they’ve had in months. He stands behind her in the clearing, his arms alongside hers and he helps her aim, breathe, fire. 

Six weeks later she sneaks through the woods with his bow in hand, a warrior goddess on the prowl, dangerous and deadly and drawing him in like a moon, a loyal dog. Her dog, her hound. Her weapon, if only she’d ask.

Her teeth glint brightly in the sun dappled underbrush as she looks at him. “Think I can do it?” she whispers, nodding toward the doe some twenty feet away, unaware and patiently grazing. 

He raises an eyebrow. What do you think?

She takes it down in two shots.

+

There are men in black and leather surrounding them, their eyes sliding over Beth’s body like oil, like grease, like violence, and Daryl wants to kill them all and knows he can’t. 

So he lowers his crossbow and says, “Y’alls travelin’ anywhere special?” All casual like, slinging an arm around her like she’s his girl, like she’s his at all. His hand runs up her ribcage, thumb tickling at her breasts. She flinches before she makes herself go boneless against him, or tries to, eyes lowered to the ground in a good showing of the demure, broken doll she’ll never be. Still, his gut clenches in disgust. 

The one with the grey hair laughs. “This one’s clearly claimed, boys. But we always like making new friends, don’t we?”

Under his arm, Beth shivers just once and then goes hunting still, the way he taught her. He noses at her temple, whispers, “Good girl,” and feels her steady. 

+

Sometimes he remembers what it was like before the prison fell. What she was like. Bright sunshine and baby smell, shy smiles and gentle hymns. Oh, there was more to her, even then, but he never bothered to look, so find out. Kept his filth and darkness as far away from her as he could.

She rarely sings anymore, hums quietly instead, a wordless vibrating sound, deeper, older, somehow. Older than the very earth they walk upon. It chills him to his bones when she does that, but he never stops her. Instead he dresses her in yellow, gives her anything she asks for, and tries to find scraps of that innocent girl in the warrior by his side. 

+

“Len followed me again,” she breathes into his neck, curled next to him in the claimers’ camp. His hand is under her shirt, resting too low on her belly to be decent, but she simply presses herself closer. Like he’s allowed. Like he’s better than the fucker who watched her take a piss. 

“Tonight,” he answers, and they settle in to wait. She quivers against him, something wild waiting to be let loose and he feels something dark curl at the corner of his lips.

They wait. 

For the fire to be doused, for road-weary bodies to succumb to sleep, for the watch to nod off. They wait like Odysseus waited in his great wooden horse and when they finally surge to their feet, most of the claimers never wake up before death falls on them, golden blue and dirty black, goddess and hound. 

+

She stops crying eventually. Stops scrubbing her hands and hair and face. Stops looking hollow-eyed. 

He stops swearing at her, biting and angry, stops hovering until they both vibrate out of their skins. 

They stop. They pick up their camp. They move on.

Come dawn, their campsite is a smudge in the dirt, a stray footprint as the soft sol swallows their steps and the trees hide their shadows. Daryl feels like he knows every plant, every animal, every game trail, like he’s spent all his life here, in these woods, wandering. 

Beth’s steps lose their baby deer wobble, turn sure and quick as she learns to let leaves hide her and branches shelter her and he knows she feels it, too. 

They stop. They move. 

+

Sometimes, he considers how long he’ll last, when he’s dead. Will he walk until his body rots away to nothing, dirt under some other poor bastard’s soles, or will there be a living soul left with mercy in their heart and a bullet to spare?

Maybe Beth will do it, he thinks. Maybe she’ll end him because he’ll surely die before her. Die defending her. Nothing else will do. 

He imagines her, fierce and kind, knife in her hand, coming down on his skull for the first and last time. 

Finding final death by her hand would be sweet. It would be a good death. 

+

Winter comes fast and hard that year and they curl around each other like pups, for warmth, for comfort, a head in a lap, legs twisted around a back, entwined. Their breaths puff in front of their faces, mingle.

“Remember the last winter on the road?”

They were so many more then, had cars, clothes, weapons. Now Andrea, Lori, T-Dog, her Daddy are gone and the others lost, to time and walkers and distance. 

Beth remembers how scared they were, back then, their first winter. They didn’t know how much worse it could be. She jokes about all the smart advice she’d give her sixteen-year-old self if she could, then stops, blinks, and observes, “Really, it all boils down to you. Stick to Daryl, I’d tell her. He’s real good.”

She smiles through her chattering teeth.

Slinging his vest over her shoulders, he bumps her hip, smiles back. He didn’t know his face moved that way, until her. 

“You know,” she adds. “I’m not even real sure how old I’m now. D’you think Christmas’s over yet?”

+

Once, just once, they stumble across a group of the living that are friendly. They’re a timid, quiet, helpless bunch, who whisper about Terminus in the dead of night, about the horrors they saw. 

They were locked into those train cars for so long, Daryl reckons, they missed half the shit out here. 

When he and Beth find them, there’s six of them, all close to starvation. They stick with them for a bit, if only so someone else will keep watch, every once in a while. Feed them up on venison and rabbit. Help them find some supplies. 

The group stays quiet, hesitant to return Beth’s smiles, or let their sole little one anywhere near Daryl. 

A few weeks in, they get swarmed. 

Daryl growls and Beth sighs as they draw their knives and wade in, stab, twist, kick, plunge, kick, spin, twist, back to back, movement swift and sure. Beth kicks out the walkers’ knees and gets them as they fall, while Daryl takes them head-on, elbowing the occasional line jumper out the way. 

Eventually, the dead stop coming. Eventually, silence falls again. 

Daryl turns to the group and finds them staring, wide-eyed. Afraid. Of him, of Beth, of what they’ve become, alone in the woods for too long. Too much blood, too much loss. 

They’re feral things, now, monsters in the dark. 

Beth’s head lowers in shame.

They leave at the next dawn. 

+

There’ll be no-one to bury them, he realizes, wading through an old campsite, torn up and ravaged, years ago by the looks of it, the wind whistling through ribcages, picked clean. 

There’ll be no-one to bury him and Beth.

+

The one story Daryl liked best was about Orpheus and Eurydice. How she died and he bargained to get her out of hell on the only condition that he wasn’t allowed to look back at her.

He mentions it to Beth once, who tells him some tale from the bible, ‘bout a woman turned to salt for looking back, and he reckons they’re similar, but not really. 

Because in his story, it’s Orpheus not allowed to look at his woman, and in Beth’s, it’s the woman not allowed to look at her city burning.

“She’s witnessing,” she explains, when he frowns at her. “Refusing to look away, you know? I think that’s beautiful, Daryl, because she’s so strong. She knows what it’ll do to her, but she still looks. She has to.” 

They’re already in hell, and he’ll always come for her. They’re in hell, and she’s the one that’ll look, that’ll always look, because god knows, in this world, no-one else will anymore. 

He’s alright with that. Her looking and him coming for her and maybe they’re shadows in hell, or maybe they’re pillars of salt. 

Maybe they’re the walking dead.

Daryl doesn’t think it matters anymore. 

+

He remembers Rick saying that, sometimes, how it’s them who’s the dead walking and he wonders what that makes the rotting bodies staggering across the world, if that makes them ghosts or nightmares.

Wonders what the difference is between them when they’re all dirty and dying, all infected with hunger tearing at their bellies and death in their eyes, wandering in search of unnamable things. 

In the end, he thinks, in the end, bones and meat is all they are, dead or alive. 

He dreams of going to sleep in the middle of a pile of corpses, snug and warm in their softness, their pungent sweetness in his nostrils. All of them have Beth’s face.

He doesn’t wake screaming. 

+

Before they leave the group, they hear whispers, of a man with his son by his side and his baby on his hip, of a young couple, a woman with grey hair.

Of a rumor called Alexandria. 

“Good a direction as any, am I right, Mr. Dixon?”

He passes her his crossbow, waves her ahead. “Lead the way, Miss Greene.”

+

“You plannin’ on stayin’ in there forever?” Daryl drawls from his perch atop the large rocks bordering the small lake they found. 

Beth, wet, clean and shiny pink, beams up at him, spitting a mouthful of water in his direction. “Maybe I’ll grow a tail and swim away!” she crows, flicking her feet above the surface for a moment. 

“Good luck with that,” he answers, waving a hand at the rocky edges. The lake isn’t fed by anything aboveground. She wouldn’t get very far, but oh, he wishes she could. 

Beth shrugs, easy, calls instead, “Come on, join me!”

+

She tells him the star constellations above them are named for Greek heroes. Tells him how the greatest of them died and were raised to the heavens to live on as stars.

He’s not dumb enough to look for Rick up there, or Merle, or any of the others, but Beth’s hand finds his across the expanse of dewy grass between them and she asks, “D’you think we’ll be up there, one day? Dixon and Green, the Great Hunters?”

She laughs, but her voice tastes of honesty.

He squeezes her slim, bony fingers tight. “Ain’t nobody left goin’ round, givin’ stars names,” he answers, gently as he can. “Make it count down here.”

She nods, decisively. “True,” she concludes around a yawn splitting her jaw. 

The stars wheel on.

+

When she sings, sometimes, quiet songs he’d never have listened to, so many lifetimes ago, he thinks he got it wrong. 

Cause, you see, Orpheus was a musician, playing for sympathy until even the gods caved and that’s, that’s her. That’s Beth. 

And maybe that makes him Eurydice, lost in hell, waiting for his Orpheus to come and get him out, make him real again. Maybe that’s what she does. Maybe she comes for him, the same way he comes for her. 

Makes him real.

+

He dreams of going to sleep in a pile of dead bodies and lets her have his bow, follows in her wake like the loyal, beaten dog he is, and he forgets. Words and people and clothes and what being clean felt like. He forgets days and months and how old she is, the stories she told him about the stars, the ones he told her about lovers lost in hell.

Alexandria, she says, sometimes, and sometimes she doesn’t. 

The trees steal the light and the soft soil sucks up sound, swallows the dead and buries them, silently. 

If he stands still long enough, his feet will grow into the ground. If he stays still long enough, these woods will bury him, will bury them both, draw them in and hold them close, soft and warm and pungently sweet. 

Beth tucks her head under his chin, taps his heartbeat out on her own thigh, stops putting her hair up in a tail, leaves it instead a ragged, golden banner streaming in her wake.

Out of hell or into it, they walk, they crawl, they run, silent and fleet-footed.

Ghosts in a dead world, Daryl thinks. 

They haven’t looked at a map since winter passed. 

+

+


End file.
